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»The Top 30 Albums of 2010 - Fashionably, fabulously late, our favorite music (and believe me, there was a LOT) of 2010, the year that some have called the best year for music ever. And only some of those fools work here. Plenty of usual suspects, lots of ties and a few surprises that I won't spoil, including our unexpected #1.

For those who cried foul over The Great Destroyer, Low's 2005 debut for Sub Pop, a bit of calming down is in order. While Destroyer was marked by forays into poppy experimentation, the Duluth outfit are now ready to reclaim the slowcore ground they once lived upon. Although they utilize the same business model as their previous effort with producer Dave Fridmann at the helm, Drums and Guns is a study in the best of what makes Low, well... Low.

Simply put, Drums and Guns is brilliant. Darkly shining in a sea of anti-war and politically charged releases, the husband/wife duo of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker along with bassist Matt Livingston, have beautifully blended a macabre worldview with their signature slow-churning-yet-poetic soundscapes. What has changed a bit this time around is in how minimal the trio allows the sound to become, which isn't much. Fridmann has become the master at creating roughly produced textures which fill in Low's white space perfectly. Drums and Guns is a headphones album, in that the cans are needed to catch all the sampled idiosyncrasies in place.

"Pretty People" morosely starts the album with Sparhawk declaring over distortion, "All soldiers/ They're all gonna die/ All the little babies/ They're all gonna die/ All the poets and all the liars/ All you pretty people/ You're all gonna die." With an appropriate tone established, Spawhawk and Parker continue to espouse their political and spiritual views of the world on appropriately-titled songs like "Murderer" and "Your Poison," the latter of which is a largely a capella number that works surprisingly well.

Livingston's enhancements are perfect on Drums and Guns, drawing the listener into the throbbing "Murderer" and picking things up a bit on "Always Fade," which finds an atypical street beat backing up the minor harmonies. Other tracks like "Breaker" have Fridmann's fingerprints all over them, utilizing drum loops and a dirty organ to get the job done.

By the time Sparhawk notes, "One more thing before I go..." at album's end, it becomes clear that, however early in the voting period we may be, Drums and Guns will undoubtedly go down as one of 2007's strongest albums.

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